So i have been using VMware Fusion a while now on my Intel based MacBook Pro, but my latest MacBook Pro had ARM cpu, and that seemed to change a few things. The most obvious was the OS support, but while using e.g. Win11 as a vm in fusion i found that when leaving vm unattended and not powering it down correctly after every use, made it ask if i had copied or moved it when trying to power on.

Saying i copied it did not work, because the next message was that it was not able to open a disk or snapshot it depended on.

This is something i did not have a problem with on the Intel based Macs.

The issue is that it creates a lock file, and therefore stops you from opening and reading the disk it depends on.

The fix(that worked for me) is actually quite easy.

• Rightclick your vm and choose “show in finder”

• Rightclick your vm again and choose “show package contents”

• here you have all the vm files and some of these are named “vmname.vmx.lck”

• just remove/delete the *.lck files.

• Boot up and it should give you no error.

The reason for the lck files is to have a lock on the vmdk file when vm is running, and my theory is that an unclean shutdown/suspend could corrupt this and give you problems like this.

Why this happens more frequently on ARM vs Intel is something we need to ask VMware / Broadcom.